Raising a child is like capturing water. Hold it in your hands, cup it close, sip the cool liquid, feel it slip and tumble and slide over your soul. Millions of drops, trickle through your fingers, you taste them on your tongue, still cool, fresh, even when they are gone you taste them. Time is frozen, frozen. Still. Then, like wisps of smoke dissipating in the ether, there, there, no. There... Gone.
Falling asleep in my arms.
Building a room worthy of Metropolis magazine out of two by fours and the slanting beer stained walls of his fraternity, sleeping on the floor, we plot and plan, he's on his own for the first time and we are literally building his home, it will be gone a few months later, but for a moment it was a shared fever dream made real, a double-layer cake, envy of his room-mates. Clever order in a frat house made for disorder, probably describes him as much as the room.
Holding his head as his body shakes, his stomach emptying, empty, blood on his knuckles, his face, his elbow weeping and swelling as I watch, glasses missing, slurred speech, friends (friends?) dropped him off a few minutes ago, 3am, I wake to the sound of something heavy falling up the stairs, bandage him up, lay him down, listen through the night for his breathing, scanning the world for details about concussions, poisoning, wondering if my namesake has been slipped him. Nothing seems right, never saw this before, what the hell is going on, wake up, sleep. Is he still breathing? Wake up. Sleep. Finally as if to signal some magic witching hour has ended sunlight streams in. This was just a bad dream. He lives. Morning has broken. Now I will kill him. Or his mom will. We'll flip for it.
He would call, pleading for us to "Pick uuup. Answer. The. Phone. Muhh. Therrrr. Of. Meeeeeeee." We would save the messages on our first, odd little tivo-like digital answering machine (designed by frog, long ago). As the years went by his pleading, his cajoling voice changing as he grew, would roll around inside that machine, even after we moved from house to house, just keep the backup batteries fresh. A time capsule of moments where he wanted to talk to us. He wanted to talk to us. And we weren't there. Or we were and sitting very still for a moment to catch our breath.
Two and a half years old, sunsetting, beetle engine ding ding dinging, road streaming by, little boy in backseat asking about the sun, its departure, its home, where? Why? We smile at each other as a song lilts, loops, lights from the boy, "it went down... it went down... it went dowwwwnnn."
Christmas morning, his apartment, eggs and bacon sizzling in the kitchen, we just sit and take it in, his apartment, not ours, not our house, not our home, his home. His. We are done. This is some thing. He is grown. We didn't completely break him, never sent him back to the manufacturer. Never asked for a refund. Somehow kept him alive to see this day against a world that was often capricious, random, brutal. Drink the water, sip it.
Its just beginning isn't it?
2 AM, no word, he's 16 with a car, a summer Saturday night party, due home at 11. 2:30 am, still no word, no call, no message, no answer on his cell phone, country roads, just last weekend 2 teens died going too fast, 2:45 am, headlights, my wife has given up, she's in bed, awake, feigning sleep, waiting to breath, door opens, he's home, I have now become his worst nightmare, mine, "The inn is closed. You, my friend were due hours ago, a call? Anything?" I give him his pillow, lead him to his car (his car, what where we thinking, was I this way, I was, I was worse, what have I become, when did someone else become so much more important to me than me?), tell him to get comfortable in the backseat, take his keys away, throw them into the field, four acres of pissed off, beside myself, not even sure what I'm angry about, but I am the bad cop and he is not coming in until he learns something, anything. Monday I get a call from my wife (the good cop), he's in the field, with recruited friends, talking about renting a metal detector to find the keys, not mad (one of the ways he is not me, he simmers but lets things go sooner... how are children so different... yet in other ways so much the same as us?), just determined. She wonders what I was thinking, was I thinking. Oddly enough I was, those keys were old, and not actually his. "I have his keys." I am clearly evil, clearly the devil, and I calculated all night long, waiting up, wondering, too much imagination, too much time, how to impart maximum devastation on his teenage soul, she laughs, calls off the dogs.
He calls now. Mostly.
At times recently I've gotten short son message services (SSMSs?) like this, "I love you. I'll call later." Not much. So much. Enough.
Never enough.
Asleep in my wife's arms.
Boy as toaster, walking down chilled October streets, car slows, cheers erupt from window, rolls on, he mounts the steps, barely making it, toaster weighing in slightly more than his 8-year-old body, we ring the doorbell (his hands trapped inside the giant slice of toast that is his body now, holding the scaffolding of his chrome covered retro appliance), door opens, he pops out of the back slot of the toaster, lightly browned, "trick or treat!" He is legend now. Suffering for art.
He was death the year his two front teeth ended up on the floor of a skating arena in Chicago, afraid to tell us, he enlists my mother as the messenger, death needed a hug very badly that night.
When he was younger he was the borg with hydraulic fingers, Carl Zeiss eyes, and rubber floor-mat gilded armor.
He was a brilliant porcelain toilet, head in cistern, Time magazine on top, flips up the lid to catch all the goodies proudly strutting down the street. This was not my idea. Portrait of an independent mind, Z as a young teen.
A year or two later he was Jean Paul Gautier with snake skin practically painted on shirt, razor cut short bleached hair, soul patch on his chin. Girls swooned. Somehow he was unaware of his beauty. Walking hand in hand with his devastatingly wondrous mother in her french toast swirled outfit with matching pad of butter chapeau. Somehow she is just as unaware of her beauty. Could I just save this one moment, drink from it a little bit more?
Snuggled up close to my mother, his grandmother, she answers his questions, they never seem to end, she doesn't mind, they drift to sleep.
Bad cop this time is mom, "Just let him get up." Snow swirls. His suit inflated against the cold south side of Chicago blustery hair frozen to head, day. Ice on the sidewalk, he's fallen again, falling behind. We continue to walk. He's just learning how. He'll get up. I want to go back and get him. I don't. The wind whips his baby face bright pink, blond hair playing hide and seek, he's with us, babbling, keeping up, running ahead, down. Again. He'll get up, I now realize. He'll look for compassion, for a reason to cry, can he cry now, nobody is even looking, what is the point? he gets up, smiles. Runs ahead again. Children I learn, are plastic elastic goose bumps on our souls. Well not all children. I only actually ever even liked one and he is...
Now under the water. He slips through the waves. He is more fish than boy. He is...
Now faking slumber when we pull into the driveway. Pick him up. Carry him inside. His feet drag on the ground. Read that again and remember that I am not a short man. He can't possibly still be asleep. I can't possibly still be carrying him home. Cars are the magic excuse for this ritual, I'm too old for this. He is. We are. We aren't, ever.
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